Disaster documentation: improving medical information-sharing in sudden-onset disaster scenarios

Abstract

This study investigates clinical practitioners’ use of medical documentation during sudden-onset disasters in order to better understand how we can improve practice. Thirteen participants, representing nine nationalities and six clinical disciplines (with the collective working experience of at least 15 different organisations providing disaster response), underwent semi-structured interviews using an inductive approach based in grounded theory. The initial codes and themes were analysed over four coding rounds and developed into selective codes. The findings suggest that documentation is overwhelmingly de-prioritised in disasters due to competing demands; there is little incentive to complete documentation at an organisational or government level; practitioners acknowledge the importance of and need for adequate documentation; paper documentation still has its place whilst electronic approaches have both benefits and drawbacks; and disasters require bespoke documentation solutions. Development of the emergency medical team (EMT) ‘data management’ role within EMTs may be one way to focus teams on key areas of improvement.     

Globalization and extraterritorial application of economic regulation: crisis in international law and balancing interests

There are two developments the combination of which has led to new challenges to international law: the growth of economic regulations and globalisation. While the modern economies are associated with the proliferation of regulatory laws which are rooted in the national economic and social policies, the loosening of the national borders and globalisation has led to conflicts of economic regulations. Such developments have posed various risks of violations of national economic regulations by the economic actors and could lead to tension among national states which have jurisdiction over multinational enterprises in one way or another. The private parties involved in such a situation could somehow avoid such risks by their own initiatives and contractual arrangements but in most cases such measures do now work and the conflict has to be resolved through the cooperation between the countries involved. The paper investigates the potentials for public international law to come up with rules, principles and norms to resolve such complex disputes which touch up issues such as non-intervention, equality of sovereign states, state immunity, self-determination and other principles of international law. Unlike certain area of international law such as law of sea where a few factors involved and the disputes could be resolved by relying on simple facts and rules, the application of national economic regulations extraterritorially creates tensions among the nation states in respect of the demarcation of national jurisdictions. It is here that public international faces a new challenges and need to come up with new approaches such a balancing of interests of the states involved in the conflicts.